Monday, September 16, 2013

Manchester United 2-0 Crystal Palace

From a red perspective, a totally forgettable game of football, but the Ashley Young diving debate, it would have been for the rest of the footballing world.
As for that "incident", the first was an obvious dive and deserved the yellow and I wasn't even sure the penalty that was given, wasn't a dive. I was in a great position to see that and it wasn't the clearest cut penalty, that's for sure. I'm not sure if it's been mentioned in the world of the punditocracy but if the ref had decided Young had dived for the second offence, surely it would have been him that would have walked. Young makes it hard for anybody to love him, it's pretty obvious by now he's not up to United standard and is fast catching Anderson up in the unpopularity stakes amongst clued up reds. And now he's again battling it with Suarez for title of the biggest diver in the premier league.
As to the game, it was pretty awful, the first half was a real non event. We threatened their goal a grand total of twice i think. Those two efforts were great moves, completely out of place in this game. The pass of Van Persie to Rooney was the pass of the match and the Dutchman should probably have scored once he had controlled it with his chest. Despite Rooney providing the pass of the match and scoring the free kick in the second half, it was another lacklustre performance. Unfortunately it has to be said, on the day, Van Perise wasn't much better, which with the eleven selected wasn't good news.
I feared the worst when i saw the team, a team including Anderson, Young and an out of form Valencia doesn't inspire confidence. The outlook brightened a little when i saw the bench included Januzaj, Zaha and Hernandez. Not really a great state of affairs when your more excited by the subs bench than the team selected.
Unsurprisingly, to me anyway, we saw the best, most fluent football of the day when Januzaj came on. Of course it was only Crystal Palace and they were down to ten men, but the Belgian showed enough to show that he belongs at this level. I don;t expect him to be starting every week, but I hope that he will get the odd game from now on. He was a definite improvement on Young when he came on, some might say that wasn't that hard.
I was pleased to see Fabio start at right back, and I thought he gave us the best performance we have seen from the right back position this season, it's just such a pity Valencia is so badly out of form. Of course it will probably be a totlally different eleven in the week, with the City game coming up next Sunday. It would be nice to see Evans and Jones start to challenge Vidic and Ferdinand for the centre back berth, I've not been entirely convinced by either of those two this season so far.
We couldn't have asked much more from the other results, Chelsea showed that just because they have got Mourinho back, all their old faults haven't totally disappeared. As for City, if our form at the start of this season hasn't been what we'd hoped for, what's to be said about them. If we were in form, next Sunday would have been a great time to be going there. Saying that I'd still gladly take a point from next Sunday's match

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